The report is a shocking exposé of how soldiers on duty were failed by senior
officers and ministers.

The conflagration in Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, which has now spread to our political establishment and police force, has ignited a formidable indignation in the British public.

As it rages, it has exposed a landscape of devastated trust: the habitual use of illegal practices by News of the World journalists, corruption within the police, and a dubious cosiness between the most questionable elements of the tabloid press and Prime Minister David Cameron.

These discoveries will, and should, have a profound and lasting impact: the public has every right to demand that we do not see their like again.

But we should not forget that there are even grimmer firefights, which exist not in the realm of metaphor but of reality. They unfold on the foreign fields of Afghanistan, and their casualties are not simply those of reputation, but of British men and women, whose deaths leave families forever desolate.

Time and again, our soldiers demonstrate the courage to go into to unimaginably dangerous situations at this country’s request, and it is the foremost duty of the government to protect them to the best of its ability.

Yet the 75-page report by the Parliamentary Defence Committee, the details of which we reveal today, is a precise and shocking exposé of how British troops on duty in Helmand, Afghanistan, from 2006 onwards were routinely failed by their senior officers and government ministers. As scandals go, it is among the very worst.

From the outset, the report concludes, the mission in Helmand was badly planned. The size of the force was capped at 3,150, around 650 of whom were active combat troops, with a budget of £808 million over three years. The capability of the Taliban, however, was far from capped: it was a highly fluid, serious and adaptable threat.

The area in which the British force was operating was half the size of the UK. Within a few weeks, it found itself in impossible positions, trapped in fixed locations and under near-constant Taliban attack.

One might have imagined that, with these towering odds already stacked against British troops, the Ministry of Defence would have ensured that they were armed with the best possible equipment. It did not.

The catalogue of mistakes is nothing short of appalling. The report found that senior officers informed John Reid, then minister of defence, that there were adequate numbers of helicopters in Helmand even though field commanders clearly said there were not; that commanders had to wait four years for sufficient funding to combat the rapidly escalating threat of Taliban improvised explosive devices (IEDs); and that no strategic reserve force was prepared, if necessary, to augment troops in Helmand as the security situation deteriorated.

The MPs also found that it was “unlikely” that the May 2006 decision to send troops to the outposts of Sangin, Musa Qala and Now Zad, “which put British soldiers’ lives at much greater risk, was put to ministers.”

Two things emerge clearly from this lamentable fog of error and blame. The first is that the British deployment in Helmand was never clearly thought through: it was a scheme cobbled together from half-baked military planning, political necessity and wishful thinking.

The second is that, when the situation in Helmand rapidly became more vicious than anticipated – and British casualties began to pile up – the MoD’s bureaucracy responded with all the urgency of a council committee requested to ponder an application for more hanging baskets in an out-of-town shopping centre. It thought about money.

It thought about the political impact of its decisions. But if it thought about the actual experience of the average British soldier on thankless patrol in Afghanistan’s searing heat, frequently outmanouevred by resurgent, murderous Taliban forces, it did very little to show it.

The MPs’ report is commendably hard-hitting, but it also raises as many questions as it answers, and they must now be addressed. It may be that, for whatever reason, senior officers did not regularly emphasise enough to ministers the life-threatening nature of shortages of equipment. In that case, all the ministers had to do was open a newspaper.

The coroner at the inquest of Captain James Philippson, 29, the first soldier to be killed in Helmand in 2006, found that he died because of the Army’s “unforgivable and inexcusable” failure to provide basic combat equipment such as night vision goggles and grenade launchers.

Our own columnist, Christopher Booker, protested in 2006 at the outrage of British troops in Southern Iraq being sent to meet their deaths in lightly-armoured Snatch Land Rovers, in conditions which also applied in Afghanistan.

In 2008, the Tory MP Patrick Mercer – after the death of four British soldiers from a roadside bomb in Afghanistan – described Snatch vehicles as “death traps” that are “packaging our troops as compact targets.”

It is sometimes said that everyone has 20/20 vision in hindsight, but in this case ministers often appear to have formulated Afghanistan policy while wearing both blindfolds and earplugs.

There is a danger that, when the public is drip-fed details of a scandal over many years – as opposed to a hectic set of revelations over weeks – it slowly loses its appetite for holding those responsible to account. We begin simply to accept too readily that poor decisions were taken by those in charge, and lives were thereby lost.

If a touch-paper is needed to reinvigorate public outrage, let it start with this report. Who failed to inform John Reid that British troops were being deployed in Sangin and elsewhere? When did he find out?

Why were men such as Brigadier Ed Butler, the commander of the first Task Force to enter Helmand, ignored when in 2005 – a year before the start of the mission – he told senior commanders that his force was short of resources?

It is said that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. We are not out of Afghanistan yet, but it cannot be too soon to learn the lessons of how our troops came to be treated with such indifference and contempt.